Texas Action (TPPA) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, principle-based organization founded on the idea that government should pursue policies that enhance liberty. In the Texas Legislature, they are considered the gold-standard for bill analysis, particularly timely analysis given the short duration Legislators have to research before casting their votes.

We were tasked with helping them build out a web application that dynamically showed a breakdown of each bill analysis in a unique formatt called a “Floor Report”. This essentially represented the order in which legislators would vote on bills.

Admin Interface

We built out an administrator interface that allowed TPPA to write up analysis for each bill and classify it into various categories. In addition to the “Bill” interface, they also had an approval interface that allowed multiple people to see a queue and work through approvals before anything went live.

Floor Report Importer

We created a process that would automatically scrape the Texas Legislative Resource website each day to pull in the appropriate floor report. This would then find any bills that had an analysis and automatically prep it for display on the website. Before our automation, this was a tedious task for them to accomplish in a timely manner. Often times, the floor report would drop late at night, and would need to be available for early morning votes the following day.

Email Template

One of the additional outputs of the Floor report Importer, is we would automatically create an email for their Executive Director to send out. This would be properly formatted, including all the specific bills for a given date and chamber, as well as links back to the web application for additional information. Much like the Floor Report process above, this was very tedious, time consuming and error prone before we automated the export.

User Interface

We built a public interface that would allow anyone to pick a date of chamber, and see all the bills that would be voted on for that day. Additionally, you could select a specific bill and view the entire analysis. This page was also optimized for physically printing off a copy so that legislators or their staff could bring it to the floor with them.